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At first, it was pretty simple. Veracia was predominately Caucasians, Farrel’s population mostly looked Hispanic, Tsuiraku was full of Eurasians with crazy anime hair color, and the Northern Confederacy was, well… hell if I know, exactly. But then I decided I wanted more variation than that, plus Bani was added to the cast and suddenly Farrel needed to be waaay more diverse just to explain her appearance. Of course those changes wouldn’t have been a problem, except that I’d also begun to write up the timeline for the origins of the humans in the Errant Universe, and I realized that there just wasn’t enough time for that kind of variation in appearance to naturally occur. I could have just gone with the Planet of the Honkies route and given everybody the same skin color, but that’s just bad… and boring, even when it makes sense in a setting. I could have just shrugged my shoulders and decided the world was a diverse melting pot for no other logic or reason than because “I said so,” but I wasn’t willing to just cop out like- Oh wait, no. That’s pretty much exactly what I did.
I decided that humans had just plain started out as an already racially diverse group, except that this caused conflicts with previous designs because now I needed to explain why the humans would have eventually all segregated themselves by appearance if they started out in the same place as a mixed group. So I wound up going with the old standard and said a wizard did it… I mean elves, the elves did it.
To be exact, my official explanation for it all became that the Elves were all gigantic racist assholes. No, really. The idea is that after the first groups of humans were plucked from the wastes dividing the Elven and Dwarven lands, the various Elven races began basically segregating them to color coordinate. This meant that eventually most of the lighter skinned humans ended up in Sanguen lands, the darker skinned humans went with the Keiren, and so on. When the elves went away, the humans pretty much stayed where they were, going on to form their own countries.
So, to sum up this long and probably offensive post, I just think way too much about this stuff and have a compulsive need to explain away things like this.
